DevConf.cz is an annual, free, Red Hat-sponsored conference for users, operators, administrators, and contributors to free and open source technologies. On 18–19 June 2026 it filled the Faculty of Information Technology at Brno University of Technology with exactly the people OpenSSL is built by and for. We came with a booth, a banner, and a single invitation: come and say hi — bring your hardest question.
This is a short field note on the two days — not a changelog, but who we met, what they asked, and why the team behind the world's most widely used cryptographic library spent a midweek in a university hall a few tram stops from its own front door.
Why we were in Brno.
DevConf.cz is a short trip for us. Brno is OpenSSL Corporation's engineering headquarters — the team that develops and maintains the OpenSSL Library is based here, in this city. The library protects much of the world's encrypted communication, and a large share of the work that keeps it secure happens a few tram stops from the venue.
That made DevConf — free, open, and run for the open-source community — the natural place to set up. The Corporation is the commercial arm of the OpenSSL project: it funds the majority of OpenSSL Projects' development and employs the engineers who maintain it. It is the largest single contributor to the OpenSSL Library. DevConf is where a lot of those people already are.
We write and maintain the cryptographic library most of the internet links against. Come and say hi — bring your hardest question.
Meet the people behind OpenSSL.
Over both days the booth was staffed by Tim Hudson, Kajal Sapkota, Lenka Luklová, Norbert Pocs, Nikola Pajkovsky and Tomáš Vávra — engineers and colleagues from the OpenSSL Corporation team, not a sales desk. The point of the stand was the line on the banner: put faces to the project, and let anyone walk up and ask the maintainers directly.
Worth answering.
The questions clustered, as they always do, around the four things the Corporation does for organisations that depend on OpenSSL:
A direct line to the maintainers, not a third party in between — the support contracts that fund the majority of full-time work on the Library.
Learn more → 02An active FIPS 140-3 certificate today, with post-quantum validation in process — built on the same provider architecture as the rebrand offering.
Learn more → 03ML-KEM, ML-DSA and SLH-DSA are built in, and TLS now defaults to hybrid post-quantum key exchange — protection with no application changes.
Learn more → 04Extended LTS keeps security fixes flowing for releases past upstream end of life, so teams can upgrade on their own schedule.
Learn more →It helped that the headline news was easy to give: OpenSSL 4.0 shipped in April 2026, and the current Long Term Support release, OpenSSL 3.5, is supported through April 2030.
The people who showed up.
DevConf is a community conference, and that is who came to the booth — students from the Brno faculties, distribution maintainers, engineers from companies that ship OpenSSL, and a steady trickle of people who simply wanted to meet the team. Some left with a belt bag or a conference bottle; everyone left having spoken to a maintainer.
It is the quiet argument the Corporation keeps making: the maintenance of critical internet infrastructure has a home, and that home is increasingly in the Czech Republic.
The road to Prague.
If we didn't get to your hardest question at the stand, there's a bigger room coming. In October the community gathers for the second OpenSSL Conference — 13 to 15 October 2026 in Prague — under the theme the Křižík Effect, after František Křižík, whose 1881 arc lamp turned electric light from a novelty into infrastructure. Cryptography now sits in that same gap: the part of the modern world that does not glow until it fails.
The room you can't get on a video call.
The OpenSSL maintainers, three days in Prague. The booth conversations from Brno carry to the conference hall — the engineers, the academics, and the people who depend on this work, in one room.
Field Reports — dispatches from OpenSSL Corporation on the work at the intersection of cryptography, open source, and the community.